Cryyyyyy!!! Crrrrryyyyy!!!!
“What art can really be--at its best--is the human impulse to transform pain into beauty. And this is why we love sad songs...[it's] the musicians' willful desire to say I'm faced with pain...and I can try to turn it into something that is the best of human experience.”
~ Susan Cain, author of Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, from her TEDtalk.
I Had a Grief Guide with a Golden Flute
Throughout junior and well into senior high school, I took weekly flute lessons. My flute teacher, Mr. Zentner, was the piccoloist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I remember him as a rather large, tall, bald man who would sit at his piano and accompany me when I played a piece, or stand next to me, reading the music over my shoulder, playing his rose gold (yes rose gold) flute.
I imagine I was not his most devoted student, as I was mostly interested in being good, not great, at the flute, but I remember those lessons fondly. And I loved being in the band.
Being in the band meant competing for chairs (the position you sit in in your section in the ensemble). Each semester Mr. Zentner and I would choose a flute solo for the chair tryout. Most of my friends would arrive at the tryouts with Vivaldi or Hindemith in their music binders, spritely tunes, their sheet music black with a multitude of sixteenth notes. When it was their turn to audition, the notes would fly out of their flutes impressing us all with their technique.
But my solo was Christoph Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits from his opera, Orfeo ed Euridice. It’s a slow and plaintive piece, not for one second showy or ornate.
Its poignant melody was mostly lost on this teenager at the time, but Mr. Zentner was determined to impart on me the pathos of the music. I remember him sitting at his piano as we worked through the music, leaning into the notes, and urging me on.
“Cryyyy!!!” he would yell across the piano’s keys, “Crrrrryyyyyy!!!” And I would attempt to cry through my flute. And when my notes only tapped the surface of Orpheus’ grief he would lean over towards me, moaning again, “Crrrrryyyyyy!!!”
I didn’t really know the story behind the music. So Mr. Zentner told me about how Orpheus fell in love with Euridice, lost her to the King of the Underworld, Hades, and then after bravely venturing down into the Land of the Dead, made a deal with Hades to bring her back to the Land of the Living. The deal: Orpheus could lead her back up to the light but could not look back, even once, or she would be destined to eternity below.Needless to say (it was a Greek tragedy, after all), at the very end of their journey, Orpheus loses his confidence and turns to make sure Euridice is there, only to lose her forever to the darkness.
Honestly, I’m not sure I truly got it, if you know what I mean. I was, of course, only 14.
This was no lighthearted tune. This was an ode to deep love and loss. This sad story could only be told through the notes being pulled--unwillingly, it seemed--out of the flute...just as I imagine Orpheus' felt as he walked his final steps, alone, out of the Underworld.
I think that Mr. Zentner must’ve had some familiarity with heart-wrenching grief because my memory of that solo is indelible. I knew that I needed to find a way to crrrryyyyy through the music, that I needed to make the listener crrrryyyyyy along with me and Gluck and Orpheus…and Mr. Zentner.
I loved that piece. I still love it. It spoke to something in my young heart that would take years to find itself. Like author Susan Cain, “I have always been a person who feels the world in a minor key.” I didn’t realize it then, but the Dance of the Blessed Spirits would ultimately become a kind of grief anthem for me. And Mr. Zentner, my first grief guide.
Mr. Zentner must’ve heard the Dance of the Blessed Spirits a million times and rarely done right. Most renditions I found on Youtube feel vacant and saccharine sweet. It’s likely that most people playing that song have no idea of the depth of the story, no idea what they are trying to impart on the listener, what Gluck was trying to impart on the listener. My friend Marion Cuesta (who was often next to me in the flute sections of the Lincoln Jr. High and Samohi wind ensembles) sent me this rendition which definitely does it justice!
